FELDMAN : for bunita marcus

For Bunita Marcus (1985) is one of the large-scale piano solos Morton Feldman (1926-1987) composed among his last works: a very quiet, sparse and very long piece (70-80 minutes) where the sense of time becomes altered: sounds slowly move and change, repeated patterns never exactly repeat, and utterly beautiful melodies emerge.
Feldman says: “For me, rhythm doesn’t exist…I started to get interested in meter. For Bunita Marcus mainly consists of 3/8, 5/16, and 2/2 bars. Sometimes the 2/2 acts as quiet, and I used the meter as a construction, the duration which something needs.”
“…I find that as the piece gets longer, there has to be less material.”

Patti Deuter is a San Francisco Bay Area pianist interested in works of extended duration: sometimes quiet & sparse, sometimes furious & loud, repetitious, or always changing. She has performed John Cage’s Four Walls (70 minutes), Maria de Alvear’s En Amor Duro (60 minutes) and even presented—with the help of some friends—Erik Satie’s Vexations, a performance which lasted 20 hours.